Elementary betting
January 13th, 2009 by Betdiary“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”
- Sherlock Holmes/Arthur Conan Doyle
Okay, I’ll be honest. Instead of coming up with a top class introduction of my own, I chose to go down the easy route and steal a wonderful phrase from the “man of letters”, as he titled himself. Reports of Conan Doyle applying this tenet to his personal betting habits remain unconfirmed; however it’s a good policy with which to lead off a column such as this.
GAA betting, due to the relatively small amount of events available to back, is an art which requires considerable amounts of patience and discipline. Unlike followers of racing or soccer, GAA supporters operate in a world where 90% of the games that they might attend in any given year pass under the radar of the bookmaking community. If you want to bet on a 5 runner selling hurdle from Perth, there isn’t a bookmaker in the land who’ll refuse you. Ask to be accommodated on the first round of the Leinster Under 21 football championship and you’ll usually get a derisory snarl in response. Betting events are few and far between and thus it is quite plausible that there can be a full weekend of games without a single standout betting opportunity.
In that environment, antepost betting is quite often the punter’s friend. The natural desire for a quick resolution of one’s wagers tends to discourage bettors from getting involved in events where settlement is some way down the road, but rest assured that compilers know this too. There is no comparison between the levels of time and consideration they apply to deriving a match price as opposed to an antepost price, so naturally it is in antepost betting where the greater value is usually to be found.
(For those who think of betting as less about finding value and more about picking winners, I strongly suggest reading Donn McClean’s initial blog entry entitled Old Benny )
Thus, we return to the words of the Baker Street detective. As it is in crime solving, so it is in betting – when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth. Or, to apply it more appropriately since even 100/1 shots will win 1% of the time if correctly priced, when we eliminate the ridiculously bad value in a field of contenders, whatever remains must be the correct selection(s) to follow.
The middle divisions of the national football league are tricky events to solve at the best of times since they are filled with teams capable of beating each other, particularly on sticky February pitches. Different teams will have different targets within their league campaign, and getting promoted might not always be the main priority for the team, even if it is crucial to those holding the betting slips. Indeed most managers would be very happy to accept a mid table finish, as long as they unearthed a few new players for the summer and ideally finished with a couple of victories to provide momentum coming into the summer.
Even allowing for all that, the market for Division 3 of this year’s NFL is appealing because there are so many contenders who are simply unbackable at almost any price. Tipperary sneaked into this division by way of Waterford’s shock victory over Antrim in Casement Park on the last day of the season, however nothing they did up to that point or since suggests that they are capable of accumulating five or more wins in this division. They may escape relegation, but they cannot win.
Roscommon have more pedigree and some fine younger players, however they too can be scratched off the potential winners list. Fergal O’Donnell is a proud Rossie who will give every ounce of effort towards turning around the fortunes of his team, but he knows very well that they need a lot more time to get back to being as competitive as they were in his playing days. They have some good individuals and will get some good results at home, but their scapegoating of John Maughan last year was just that – a calling for the head when the body was diseased to the core. They are moving in the right direction and may even get shorter in price after the first couple of rounds, however they do not have the wherewithal to beat most of the teams in this league and look set for a respectable but unspectacular campaign.
Longford simply do not have the talent, and Brian Kavanagh’s drop in form, visible to all who watched Kilmacud play in the Leinster club championship, will hurt them severely. Expect them to battle the drop rather than contest the top.
Now we get into the five contenders widely expected to push for promotion to division two, and there are two big names who can also be scratched off the list. First, we have Cavan. Breffni boys are never shy to remind any of their Ulster cousins how Cavan have a history unparalleled in the province, but that history has become as much of a burden as it is an asset. Good young players continue to emerge from the many well run clubs within the county, only to stall in their development before maximising their potential, in many cases due to excessive pressure and expectation which can either massage the ego excessively or else drives players away from the game. Past managers have been chosen for all the wrong reasons and while Tommy Carr is a good appointment who will bring them back to basics and build from there, he’ll spend most of the Spring finding out who won’t be up to playing championship football and will do well to come away with four victories out of seven.
Finally, and with a heavy heart, this devoted Biffo assures you that Offaly cannot win this division and are farcically underpriced at 5/1. Indeed if there was a bet available on who would be relegated and the counties were put in the reverse order to their prices to win the division, as would be intuitive, yours truly would be forced to advise a maximum bet on Offaly to return to division four in 2010.
The fixture list has been kind, with four home fixtures and two of the three away trips requiring no more than a short hop over the border (Roscommon and Tipperary) but last summer’s appalling championship campaign was the culmination of several years of slow decay, masked by the Leinster Championship run of 2006. Too much loyalty has been shown to players who simply are not up to the task and Richie Connor disappointed many when he failed to prune the withering branches of a diseased tree in picking his first squad. The lack of physical power in the ranks, save for a few hardy old stagers, is a huge failing and while there is some individual talent there, right now there is no front runner to wear the 3, 6, 9, 11 or 14 jerseys this summer. Some vacancies might yet be filled, but expect a lot of trial and error along the way, error that will lead to points being dropped.
With three counties left, our elimination is done. Louth’s results in the O’Byrne Cup have been impressive and the county could get off to an early start and hang on through a tense finish, but this column would advise simply covering stake on the Wee County, no more. The bets to win should be on Down and Limerick, available at 9/4 and 5/1. Both counties have three home and four away matches, but they are the class outfits of this division and each have good men in charge who have earned the respect of their players and who don’t have to engage in any rebuilding. Limerick’s win over Meath last summer was a shock to many but not to Mickey Ned and his men, while Down’s loss to Wexford was put into context by the subsequent performances of the Model men. At just over even money combined with a saving stake on Louth, those patient enough to put their money aside and bide their time should reap the rewards by the end of the Spring.
January 13th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
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